


Candy Ichor

by MorbidOptimist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cannibalism, F/F, Parent/Child Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 02:22:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6781513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidOptimist/pseuds/MorbidOptimist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say candy is dandy and liquor is quicker, but Roxy is out of booze and she's drifting through the void with nothing but evaporating memories for company when she decides to follow a light in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candy Ichor

Most things were either meaningless in the void, or quickly became that way, Roxy learned. Things that used to be important constructs like time, space, and light. All were were irrelevant in the expanse of nothingness that she drifted through. Even smaller things like happiness and hope were eventually slain and willingly parted with, though some part of her was sure she had parted with most of her feelings long before she cast herself adrift. She had tried to let go of her memories too, but memory was an aspect all its own and refused to remain anything other than stubbornly persistent in her mind.

Her timeline flashed before her, and the familiar pang of misery lurched in her chest and dug into her bones.  
There had only been Dirk and herself, and their tiny two player session had been nothing but one complicated doomed paradoxical mess after the other, rift with teen drama that had seemed direly important at the time. Now, Roxy could hardly distinguish any significance from any of it, now that time had no meaning for her.

Roxy closed her eyes.

Or, perhaps she didn’t; it was just as dark either way and trivial things like lids and limbs were difficult for her to keep track of; there weren’t any reference points out in the void.

She often wished there was something in the void besides herself, a star perhaps or even a small generic object would have been welcomed.

She could make games of determining how long it would take to reach it, imagine where it had come from, maybe even name it after that one basketball in that one movie Dirk had told her about once.

Roxy winced.

At the end, Dirk had fragmented himself into non existence, in order to escape the game.

She found herself wishing her powers would be so merciful as to grant her a similar fate.

A whimper escaped her lips; tears were her only visitor now, and her sadness was her sole companion.

She wondered when the void would take that, too.

 

At some point, an eventuality which occurred with neither context nor point of reference, Roxy decided that it was okay to admit defeat and opened her sylladex.

She had no more booze -that had up and run out long ago, but she had one item left that she hoped would help take her mind off things, if only for a little while.

Among the scant few items that remained in her inventory, was a juju.

Well, a replica, of a juju to be precise.

It had been part of some last ditch effort plan to thwart some big nasty or other; the details were rather muddled now.

But she remembered vaguely that the lollipop was capable of altering her mood and after being bored and brimming with melancholia for so long, any change would be welcomed with open arms and whatever remained of the shards of her psyche.

She took a lick, mostly to wetten the surface of the sweet, and then took another; she followed the swirling trail with her tongue and tried to keep her nose from getting sticky.

The change came rapidly.

She started to fidget, then shake.

The sugar burned its way down her throat and spread out through her vessels and arteries and then seeped into bones and sinew with infectious ease.

Another lick and she was helplessly out of breath from attempting to stifle down laughter.

She was jittery and to her surprise, the void around her started to take on a color, indiscernible as it was.

Another lick and she started cackling, and howling so hard tears streamed from her eyes.

Everything was suddenly hilarious!

Why on Earth had she been so upset?

Really, she thought, everything was always just so perfect! No need for tears at all!

Roxy spent a few minutes drinking her newfound exuberance for joy itself, contemplating it as much as her new state of being allowed.

That was to say, that she was pretty sure she was in a new state of being at any rate; her outfit was different and striped and colorful and so tasty looking that she wanted to lick it. She did and was delighted to find that it tasted like fabric instead of candy; how wonderful for things to work as they should for once! Roxy wondered if there was anything else to discover in the void, and took another look at it.

The void itself looked so much prettier!

It was maybe black? Sort of purple?

Hard to tell when she couldn’t stop shaking and giggling and trying not to notice the whispering in her ears.  
Wait, whispering?

Roxy was startled and ecstatic to notice that yes, indeed, there was some sort of not-sound ringing in her head and it was the most miraculous thing to happen that she could remember.

She bounced around, trying to figure out which direction the not-sound came from, until she remembered that direction was meaningless in the void. She grinned then, wide and relieved, and shot off into the dark, laughing merrily.

Almost immediately, the whispering not-sound stopped.

Roxy traded laughs and giggles with herself, she snickered at how absurd it was that she tried to follow something that didn’t exist until something in the distance caught her attention.

It was a light, she realized; which shouldn’t exist at all in the void! Silly thing!

What was it doing out there in the dark, being lit up over there like there was stuff to light up? Like there were places and directions where none should be?

She grinned and flew faster.

And faster.

And faster still, just because she could, and because the feeling of the void rippling against her body was so wonderfully delightful that she simply couldn’t consider doing anything else.

The void span around her and shuffled through an assortment of colors and patterns, making her dizzy and nauseous until she arrived at the source.

She skidded comically to a stop, and for a moment, was breathless and stunned.

Before her was her mother.

It wasn’t her mother from the videos she had watched growing up, or her mother in the blurry photographs she had once found on the deep web and SkaiaNet, but she was certain that the woman before her was her mother still.

It looked as though she had been molded out of the void, or else infected by it some how.

She was as tall as Roxy remembered from the vids.

Her skin was ashen and dripped ink smeared shadows. She seemed to drink in the darkness, and emit it continuously.

The light Roxy had seen had been the emotion from her mother’s blindingly bright glowing eyes and hair, that too cast a continual disturbance in the void.

The woman was also frozen in place, as if perhaps she also hadn’t considered the possibility of meeting anything substantial in the endless void, or maybe had not foreseen her genetic progeny greeting her in a sugar coating.

Roxy giggled, at how funny that was, and then she started to shake.

Her giggle grew into a chuckle and then rolled into full blown laughter.

Honestly, how could she have done anything else?

It was just too good, to funny to not enjoy; if Dirk had been around, Roxy was certain that he would been laughing alongside her at this glorious irony.

Her mother said something, which broke Roxy out of her laughter long enough to realize that she had no idea what language her mother was speaking.

Roxy was thrilled!

Her mother was real! And could talk!

How utterly amazing!

She tried to relay how truly wonderful this news was, shouting and gesturing wildly as she did so; her mother seemed slightly amused by her antics, and this only prompted Roxy to have another fit of laughter.

When Rose tried speaking again, Roxy was transfixed by the way black liquid dripped from between her lips and ran in tiny trails down her chin and along her neck before dissipating completely.

The idea of restraining herself wasn’t even a possibility Roxy could have considered; she simply did as her whims directed and rejoiced; she watched a droplet traverse its path along her mother’s flesh before darting her attention back to the pitch stained lips and launched forward.

She had launched a little too hard, and her lips bruised against her mother’s, and she thought their teeth might have clacked a bit, but Roxy was beyond capable of worrying over such minor things; the pain proved further that her mother was real and not a figment of her imagination! How could she not celebrate that? And as far as she was concerned, Roxy decided instantly, that kissing her mother again was the only way to properly celebrate this miraculous occasion.

This time, arms encircled her; too many arms, most of which weren’t corporeal, but it was the more the merrier as far as Roxy was concerned and when Roxy began giggling against her mother’s mouth, her mother answered with an unnaturally deep rumbling purr and Roxy let herself fall into another fit of jubilant laughter all over again.

 

It wasn’t that hard learning the elderitch tongue, Roxy found. It was just another language after all, and when one had all the time (or not-time) to spend at their leisure with a masterful teacher, learning even the most unruly and infuriating of forgotten and forbidden tongues was a cinch for one Roxy Lalonde.

Once they had been able to communicate through more than hand gestures and fits of giggles, Roxy and her mother had talked.

  
Her mother was very knowledgeable; she possessed vision omnifold along with her Seer of Light title and was once her ancestor, living on an invaded Earth quickly succumbing to the Batterwitch’s tightening hold. An Alpha Rose, as she phrased it. Maybe not her specific Alpha Rose, as there were far too many timelines to tell, but a Rose just the same; her mother, just the same, Roxy thought.

And Rose, Rose, Rose, Roxy had told her, was a beautiful name.

She told Roxy about Grimdarkness and Tricksters and some of the game mechanics that had eluded her back when she and Dirk had needed them most.

How Rose had made it into the game, and how she had gone Grimdark, as it turned out, were hazy spots in Rose’s memory.  
Roxy wasn’t quite sure she believed that her omnipotent mother had any sort of blind spot, but she supposed that after living in the void for so long, nearly anything was possible to erase.

Or perhaps, she thought once, her mother was simply trying to spare herself from remembering something sad.

She tried to keep her mother’s attention away from those things; she wished she could kiss her hard enough that the candy coating would slip between her teeth and sink down into her core so that she would never have to remember sad things again.

Roxy vaguely remembered about sad things sometimes.

Almost.

The candy coating over everything made it hard to properly assess things.

There were just too many reasons to be happy to be happy after all.

And everything was just so funny!

Roxy had a lot of reasons to be happy now, and most of them were comprised of the things she and her mother did to entertain themselves.

Well, most of the things her mother did to entertain her, Roxy amended.

After finally meeting her, Roxy refused to leave her side, and hounded the woman until she relented; she had agreed to the role of motherdom, and eventually, given herself over to the idea of keeping Roxy amused.

Her mother could manipulate light, and by some Grimdark extension, shadows, black ichor, and ink.

The tendrils writhing off of her, she used as extra arms, although none of them ever bended in any way that could resemble a flesh based appendage.

Saltwater sat heavy in her body, deep in her lungs, and she could cough it up at will, if it pleased her to do so.  
Underneath the salt was ichor, a black bile thick sludge that burned through everything it touched. It was the blood of the Grimdark and when she coughed it up, it came with bones and mutant stillborn fry.

Ink swam just underneath her skin, and seeped from her eyes like tears, and poured from her lips like sin. If she talked in a sing song voice, the ink would contort and thousands of eldritch letters would dance along her skin, sending Roxy into a frenzy of delight.

At her request, Rose would put on elaborate shadow puppet shows about the different timelines she liked. Sometimes Roxy would just spend lapses of time staring at the shadows to watch them swirl, and rain, drip and writhe.  
Othertimes Rose would create thousands of tiny little lights, called them starlets, and together they would map out constellations and write down their legends.

When Roxy revealed to her mother how much she had loved her books, Rose had pulled her into her lap and read them to her one by one, over and over until, pausing for fits of giggles and bursts of guffawing laughter. And each time Roxy would talk about each book, each character and chapter, excitedly relaying her thoughts about even the most simple of sentences and concepts.

She used to read these books as a child, she’d tell her mother.

Her mother would smile, and press a kiss to her temple, staining it with ink and read on.

Once, the candy haze wore off just long enough for Roxy to tell her the hazy memories she had of how her mother’s books had faithfully kept her company for countless nights and hours, and how aside from the all the bottles she had emptied, that for the longest time, they had been her only friends.

The memory was so funny, that Roxy had laughed until tears had streaked down her face and she had found herself unable to breath.

Rose had started a new passtime then, one where she would croon ink coated lullabies into her ears and made trails of shadows dance against her skin and hands massaged her thighs.

She would never be alone again, her mother promised, before she pressed another kiss to Roxy’s temple; and she said nothing more until Roxy’s bought of mania subsided.

She used to play the violin, Rose tells her once, after a stretch of time of doing nothing in particular. She let’s slip casually, as if she were talking about the weather back in a time where that was a thing they could actually do.

Roxy finds this, like everything else, utterly magical, and the violin is the second thing her mother teaches her.

They play together; first melodic, in sync; ethereal.

Then wild, chaotic.

Together, their music could tear apart the void itself, Roxy thinks, and the thought is so maddeningly divine that she doesn’t stop laughing until she’s forced to regenerate from something like asphyxiation; there’s no air in the void but Roxy instinctively tries to breath anyway, which both Lalondes find amusing.

Rose doesn’t find it amusing when she dies, Roxy quickly finds; which is funnier, because Roxy is god tier and she’ll always come back. There’s nothing just or heroic out in the void after all.

Still, it makes her mother nervous, so they make a game of it; the longer Roxy goes without needing to respawn, the more Rose is pleased, and Roxy thought that that was a fine game indeed; kisses of victory tasted different from regular kisses and Roxy loved how all the flavors swirled around in her head and made her fingers ache.

She is a Rogue of Void, Roxy eventually tells her between such kisses, and doesn’t know what that means.

Rose pushes Roxy away, just to arms length, and looked at her for a moment with blinding eyes filled with Seer Light.

Roxy was thrilled to just be in her mother’s general presence, and giggled at the feel of her eyes watering and burning from staring into the glow.

And then then Rose smiled, wicked and cruel.

Her teeth were too many and too sharp and too beautiful, Roxy thought.

She giggled and babbled happy incoherent syllables as Rose pulled her flush against her body, and lovingly wrapped her shadow tendrils around them in thick coats of writhing Grimdarkness.

She can steal things from the nothingness, Rose tells her in their tiny cocoon; she is important still, and there’s something important that they need to do.

Roxy laughed so breathy and light that Rose had no choice but to join in and the pair of them laughed and hissed and cried until they both nearly respawned.

 

With this new information swimming about in their veins, they began a wonderful new game where everytime Roxy created something, Rose’s hand would sift gently though Roxy’s hair, and she would whisper to her of just how proud she was, and would then tilt her head back for a kiss.

During these news lessons, Roxy bounced between ecstasy and rapture with wild abandon and her laughs started to burn her insides less and less.

Her mother idly stated that her body was simply getting used to the feeling of her internal organs being burned alive constantly, which had Roxy roaring uncontrollably.

She got quite good at manifesting items while losing herself to wild laughter.

She started with little things, cubes and generic objects, little octagonal not quite right shapes, and those soon gave way to bigger objects, chairs and tables and a very phallic block striped with different colors.

The phallus pulled a laugh from Rose, and she rewarded her with an ink flavored kiss.

Inspired, Roxy in a technicolored flash of ingenuity, ripped her childhood home from the void itself and pulled it into her mother’s approving gaze.

Rose was utterly pleased, proud, and content at the achievement; she informed Roxy of this between caresses, and she had allowed Roxy to claim multiple rewards with little protest.

The house itself was empty, when they ventured inside, and Roxy was delighted when Rose instructed her to fill it.

Along the way, her mother made other suggestions, additional rooms to be made and items that Rose felt would come in handy, or else just be fun to have around.

Some things, her mother added herself, like balls of glowing light to brighten up the place and a river of light underneath the house that cascaded down into the eternity of the void beneath it.

They couldn't make a real river, she said, and she didn’t really want one, but she admitted to liking the aesthetic.

Roxy was happy to oblige any and all requests, and the pair of them kept decorating until Rose was satisfied; Roxy had simply remained overjoyed from start to finish.

Some things about their home were quite different, like the way the colors on the walls swirled with gradients of color and speckled themselves with different patterns the longer Roxy looked at them.

Roxy spent a long while describing them for her mother, the ever mutating patterns and the colors, some of which had no name and had previously not existed.

Rose could see some of the colors too, she revealed with a coy look in her eyes, as she possessed the ability to see most ranges of light, infrared and ultraviolet others besides.

The patterns however, apparently did not exist, at least not in any range Rose could see, and then Roxy had to spend a great length of time describing what it was like being stuck in TricksterMode.

Roxy relayed between bits of hysteria, how her insides were molten sugar and how her organs sometimes glitched places they shouldn't inside of her body, and how that made her laugh with tears in her eyes, then spoke of the way glitter dripped from her wrists whenever she chewed them open; how everything was always no less than a thousand different colors, and how she could practically see how good everything would taste, and the way she was always hungry but never for normal food. She mentioned between snickers, how ‘impulse control’ were words rendered meaningless in her dictionary, right next to words like time, space, and regret.

It was cute, Rose had said, how Tricksters were inversions of Grimdarks.

Squiddles and Horrorterrors, Roxy had replied before laughing hysterically.

They were all tangle buddies in the end, she had spit between her giggles.

Tangled and torn, Rose had whispered.

The main floor of their new home, when the Lalondes had gotten around to exploring it, was largely the same as Roxy remembered from her old one.

The kitchen was a bit bigger, and there was now a bathroom on the level adjacent to the study, but the bookshelves and couches were just as they always were. There were now knitting supplies scattered over the endtables between wizard statues, which Rose had pulled out of her sylladex, and a few .gif formatted paintings that her mother had hung up as well; gifts from her belated brother, apparently.

Her face had contorted when she mentioned his name, and when pressed, she confessed that she missed him dearly and that he had not made it into the game. She had spent a great deal of time trying to rectify that, to no avail, and more time after, trying to escape the game herself, before giving into temptation and handing herself over to the ever passionate throes of grimdarkness.

Roxy had held her breath and bitten her tongue to keep from giggling, tackled her mother into a hug, and then tried in vain to cover up Rose’s internal ichor with her candy coating and laughed herself to tears when she tasted saltwater and ink inside her mother’s mouth instead of jolly rancher flavored fruit and glitter.

When they regained their composure, or rather, what passed for their composures, Rose declared that it was time for a rest.  
Roxy had tried to protest, she didn’t feel tired, just bubblegum pink and three different shades of fuchsia; but Rose won her over by promising to let her jump on the bed for awhile.

Every bed had to be good and bounced on, Rose had said; wasn’t it funny how the word ‘bed’ looked like the object it labeled, Roxy had answered before chuckling on their way up the stairs.

They shared a room, because Roxy hadn’t even considered doing anything otherwise, and after Roxy had her fun, it took several tries for them both to get used to sleeping in a bed instead of drifting directionlessly in an expanse of nothingness; which had taken Roxy quite a while to stop giggling at.

The house itself was still drifting... Technically. Probably.

They now had a stable point of reference to work from, and it was pretty jarring for them both, especially because they had no other reference to compare to this one, other than themselves.

It had taken longer for Roxy to stop giggling at that, too.

Eventually, they both remembered how to sleep.

Sometimes when they slept, Rose would tuck her head against Roxy’s collarbone and let their limbs get tangled. Roxy would wake up smiling, because she was never not smiling, and her mother would smile back and Roxy’s head would fill with the taste of sugar cookies and Rose would fill their tub with the ocean residing in her lungs and Roxy would coat it with glitter from her veins and they would bathe until they were sparkling and bored.

Othertimes, her mother tossed and turned and hissed out the broodfester tongues and black blood spurted from her lips, the bed rattled, and the house rattled with it. Those times, Roxy peeled Rose’s dress away to taste the flavors of the ichor dripping down her mother’s skin and bite away the ashen flesh to the black marrowed bone beneath.

Blood tasted good with a candy coating, she found, and bone even better.

Her mother always grew back together before breakfast, usually with a few more tendrils in tow, so Rose told her not to worry about it, as if Roxy was still capable of having worries at all.

Roxy found the sentiment endearing giggled whenever she thought about it.

During one of the thrashing sleeps that began happening with greater frequency, while Roxy was working to relieve her mother of the cloth restricting her movement, Rose jolted awake and growled so deeply that Roxy’s heart skipped several beats. Rose flipped them over and pinned Roxy to the tousled sheets beneath them and for a moment, Roxy was certain that Rose was going to bite through her jugular and give cannibalism a try herself.

Roxy was delighted by this new turn of events, and snickered through clenched teeth as Rose struggled to regain her power of speech between heaving breaths and dripping ink.

“We’re out of time,” Rose hissed unnaturally.

“Time doesn't exist here,” Roxy giggled unnervingly.

This seemed to calm her, after a moment, and the older Lalonde sighed deeply.

Roxy giggled and squirmed whenever the cold black droplets dripped onto her skin and laughed when the tendrils started coiling around her legs; she howled when teeth nibbled along her chest and she fell into mania when her mother whispered how sweet a girl she was.

 

It wasn’t until Rose made them a bath afterwards that she revealed the cause of her slumbering distresses.

It caught Roxy unaware, and her attention shifted from molding a pony out of grape scented bubbles to watching her mother with rapt attention.

Grimdarkness, like TricksterMode, Rose reminded her, stemmed from the Horrorterrors, and they conversed with her in her dreams. They used to speak to her directly, she added, but only when she was awake, and that now they were dying at an alarming rate, they lacked the power to contact to do so anymore. And they were scared.

Roxy stopped trying to lick up the ever-changing-flavored bubbles stuck to her skin and chortled.

The Horrorterrors wanted their help, Rose had said evenly, and she very much wanted to assist them but that the only one who could really help them was Roxy.

How? Roxy had asked innocently, before her giggling resumed.

Rose beckoned, so Roxy swam forward to claim her place in her mother’s lap. When she was settled, she threw her arms around Rose’s waist and began licking the bubbles off her neck.

“Kitten,” Rose whispered as she ran a hand through her daughter’s hair, “have you ever considered learning the art of interdimensional motherhood?”

 

It was, Roxy found, difficult to pull something living out of the void, and harder still to pull something out that was not-alive and worser still to create something neither living nor inanimate and fully sentient as well.

Roxy began with a small living thing first.

A doormouse, to be precise.

Rose had expected her to start with a cat or pony, but Roxy felt it would be far more fun to try a mouse instead; and as there was little room for reason in her TricksterMode addled state, her mother nearly nodded her consent and let Roxy have it.

It took her seventeen tries to make a mouse out of flesh and not squishy green cubes.

There were countless tries after, to form one that was breathing.

She named the first success Dave.

It was hysterical when he perished in the oxygenless expanse of the void.

Deadmouse Dave, he was rechristened, and the name made Rose chuckle whenever Roxy said it. It was funnier still, when her mother let her put him in a teapot to keep. Rose wasn’t quite sure why she wanted him in a teapot as opposed to a jar, but Roxy was fairly certain that somewhere along the line of her youth, she had read a book with mice in teapots and turtles that cried about soup; Wonderland, Rose would later inform her, as she set the mouse on top of the table among a ring of teacups.

The story of a girl that fell into a world of nonsense and tried to get back to the place they had started from. There were lots of stories like that in the olden days of Earth, Rose admitted; stories Rose never left in Roxy’s house because she never wanted to give Roxy a false hope about returning to home once she entered the game.

Stories she never left her, because she wanted Roxy to be more capable than they.

Roxy focused hard on her skill mastery, the self imposed game she made to outshine the incapable story girls poured joy addled determination into her chest.

With the mastery of creating life under soon her belt, Roxy attempted to create non-living sentience.

Horrorterrors were not quite on the same plane of existance, Rose had explained, and fed off of the thoughts people had about them. She needn't create an adult, just a baby. It would grow on its own under their care, and once she had made one, she would make others, each more impressive than the last, and their kind would be saved from extinction.

Which was a good thing, she had further explained, because without the Horrorterrors keeping the dream bubbles stable, Paradox Space and subsequently, the Alpha timeline, would all be doomed and even they, drifting out in the furthest expanses of the void, would cease to be or ever have been.

Tiny not-quite-cats, she had offered, with too many limbs and eyes was likely to be a good place to start from.  
After innumerable amount of failed attempts that Roxy found each funnier than the last, Roxy felt her coating begin to crack for the first time.

She laughed until she cried, and her howls took what felt like eons condensed into seconds to reach her mother, who could do nothing but watch her daughter teeter on the brink of breaking into multicolored rivers of sugar and hopeless despair. Neither of them knew what would happen if Roxy crashed from her sugar rush, and Rose looked determined to keep them both from finding out.

Steadily, Roxy was lifted by her mother’s tendrils and cradled gently in her arms.

Rose carried her into the house, up the stairs and into the ensuite, where she was deposited into the tub.

Rose stripped her, settled down behind her. She shushed, and cooed, and petted, but Roxy could not quite herself.

So her mother turned to more drastic measures. She turned Roxy around to face her, and kissed her open mouthed, and forced her ichor down Roxy’s throat.

As the cold ichor numbed Roxy from the inside out, Rose hugged her closer, and left black stains along Roxy’s skin where her not quite corporeal tendrils touched. The Intense litght spilling out of her hair and eyes made Roxy’s eyes water and burn. Rose cut paths in the shadows with her fingertips, and everywhere she touched, she left trails of light that sparked along Roxy’s flesh.

She deepened her kiss more and more, until Roxy was completely arched against her, shuddering. Rose encircled the back of Roxy’s neck in one hand, and glided her other down her chest, past her navel, and then buried it between her daughter’s thighs.

As she pulled Roxy closer to the verge of release, the hand around Roxy’s neck tightened, the hand between Roxy’s legs worked along a crescendoing rhythm, Roxy’s lungs were increasingly filled with more ichor. The differing sensations bloomed into a cacophony of feelings, flavors, and colors inside Roxy’s head and body, and when build became too much to bear, Rose pushed her the edge and cradled her she fell.

Over and over, Rose repeated this concert of catharsis, until Roxy was helplessly shuddering in her arms and spilling tiny black coated candy between her lips every time she breathed.

Roxy started coughing, and her mother held her as her body began to heave.

The bubbles became bigger and the more of her internal contents she rejected, the more paux-breath she drew into her lungs.

She started giggling.

And then chuckled quietly and murmured words that got stuck together and slurred between the stickiness coating her teeth.  
Rose sighed, a catharsis filled not-breath of her own, and pulled Roxy back against her.

Soothingly, softly, her mother licked her face clean, and the quiet melodic lullaby was the last thing Roxy heard before exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep.

 

The second success was a large cat sized creature with an asymmetrical number of tentacles and a littering of generic object shaped eyes.

His name was Elgarath the First, the Relayus Minimus, Evoricorater and Dream Glutton, The Squire of Rainbow Falls.  
Rose called him Squiddlebutt for short.

He fit perfectly in Roxy’s arms, and that was precisely where Roxy kept him. She’d spend hours, sitting on her mother’s lap, with the baby terror in her own, and lovingly stroke his suckered appendages while Rose spoke to him to broodfester tongues.

There was not much in the way of knowing whether or not Horrorterrors possessed morals, but the Roxy though it would be fun to try imparting them anyway, and Rose had little else to do while Roxy birthed others from the void.  
Soon one baby terror became three, and then seven, and somewhere around twenty four.

True to her mother’s predictions, each was more genetically appaling and intriguing than the last. They grew large quickly, and slowly, as time was still irrelevant, and it soon became commonplace for the Lalondes to fall asleep tangled contentedly in the nestled tentacles of their larger offspring.

Rose taught them languages and mathematics, as impractical as they were in their chosen domain of existence, followed by music and manners and definition of irony.

Roxy taught them how rhyme and create inside jokes, how to play tag and shoot a gun and how to hack; their were no need for computers in the void, but Roxy had a tickling hunch in her stomach that once full grown, her babies would be capable of hacking things light aspects, concepts, and reality.

She was so very, very, proud of them.

The best laugh Roxy ever had, was watching her mother sit several mid sized juveniles at the table and instruct them all on the correct usage of fancy cutlery.

They didn’t need to eat solid food, Rose had said, but they certainly did not abstain from desperately gripping their tiny forks and knives to transfer tiny particles of frosted confections into their gaping mouths.

Rutherburt the Beautifully Grotesque, the Belle of the Ball, and also known as Frigglish, had tried to bypass the cutlery and just scoop up her plate to eat it and its contents whole. She had nearly succeeded before Rose scolded her with a threat to send her to her room if she didn’t behave; which was hysterical, because their offspring did not have have their own rooms.

The older ones wandered the house as they pleased, like oversized house cats!

Roxy had nearly died laughing, and then Rose had threatened to send her to her room.

Eventually though, their children were too large to birth inside the house, and some were too large to live inside it any longer as well, and so trips to “the backyard” became commonplace.

They nearly lost the first batch to the brightness of the river before Rose dimmed it enough that the broodlings could acclimate.

Roxy made sure to adjust the composition of the future spawn, and before long, she insisted Rose make the river brighter than before, so that their children would always be able to find their back home, if they followed the light.

Dozens of broods came and went, and dozens churned over into hundreds.

They knew each of their spawn by name and vocation, their talents and interests.

They squabble like any children would, and there were times they had to lay down the parental law, so to speak, but for the most part, they all seemed well behaved and as well adjusted as one could imagine being raised by two corrupted Lalonde-ian women could be.

Eventually, when the number of their offspring had drifted near a thousand, Rose bade her daughter over and stroked a newborn for a few moments before speaking.

Roxy smirked, and rocked against her heels.

The Game had been won, Rose informed her idly while petting their youngest lazily. A new universe had been created, and a small gaggle of kids with their own teenaged Rose and their own teenaged Roxy were in the new universe with them.

This time, Roxy laughed and laughed from a place beneath her candy coating; what need had she for a new universe, she asked between heaving cackles, when she had already created a new one of her own?

That time, when she howled, Rose joined her, and their children drifting beyond the furthest of rings hummed happily at the comforting noise echoing throughout the fathomless void.


End file.
